Running a Go binary as a systemd service on Ubuntu 16.04

This is a quick guide to run a Go binary as a systemd service - a daemon - on Ubuntu 16.04, which is the latest LTS version available.

This article will not talk about how to create Go services, cloud architecture, and so on.

Creating gatomocho as a systemd service

Create /lib/systemd/system/gatomocho.service with the content:

[Unit]
Description=Gatomocho service
ConditionPathExists=/home/ubuntu/work/src/gatomocho/main
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=gatomocho
Group=gatomocho
LimitNOFILE=1024

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
startLimitIntervalSec=60

WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/work/src/gatomocho
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/work/src/gatomocho/main

# make sure log directory exists and owned by syslog
PermissionsStartOnly=true
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /var/log/gatomocho
ExecStartPre=/bin/chown syslog:adm /var/log/gatomocho
ExecStartPre=/bin/chmod 755 /var/log/gatomocho
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=gatomocho

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The absolute paths in ConditionPathExists, WorkingDirectory and ExecStart all need to be modified per your environment. Notice that we have instructed systemd to run the process as the user gatomocho, so we need to create that user as well:

cd /tmp
sudo useradd gatomocho -s /sbin/nologin -M
sudo chmod 755 /lib/systemd/system/gatomocho.service

Now, you should be able to enable the service, start it, then monitor the logs by tailing the systemd journal:

sudo systemctl enable gatomocho.service
sudo systemctl start gatomocho
sudo journalctl -f -u gatomocho

The journal is stored as a binary file, so it cannot be tailed directly. But if we configure syslog, we have syslog forwarding enabled so that we can have our log sent to /var/log/gatomocho/.

What's next?

The answer depends on how you configured your environment. A few bullets to take care of:

• Update firewall rules
• Create a domain server on nginx
• Enable SSL for your domain